Description
This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia.
Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Mapping Liberalism and Empire in Southeast Asia
Gareth Knapman and Mary Quilty
Chapter 2 – Before Liberalism: William Marsden’s Late Enlightenment Imperial Critique
Diana J. Carroll
Chapter 3 – Pragmatism at Play: Farquhar, Raffles and the Founding of Singapore
Nadia Wright
Chapter 4 – The Ideological Origins of the Founding of Singapore
Tze Shiung Ng
Chapter 5 – Potato and Rice-eaters: Labour, Wages and Racial Anxiety in Classical Political Economy and British Colonial Administrators in Southeast Asia
Mary Quilty
Chapter 6 – The Gaze of a Liberal Imperialist: Observing and Interpreting Oriental Despotism in John Crawfurd’s work
Martin Müller
Chapter 7 – John Crawfurd’s 1829 Pamphlet on Free Trade and Colonisation and his Liberal Campaign for British Imperial Reforms in India and Southeast Asia
Wilbert Wong
Chapter 8 – Protector of aborigines or War Criminal: Two Opposing Liberal Views of James Brooke
Gareth Knapman and Martin Müller
Chapter 9 – The Liberal Security Experiment in Southeast Asia
Gareth Knapman
Chapter 10 – The Liberalism Narrative in Southeast Asia, and Australia
Anthony Milner
